Municipal Involvement in the Funding of Weekly Teaching Hours in Primary School Education and Its Effect on Affirmative Action in Jewish State EducationAuthor: Nachum Blass, Noam Zussman and Shay TzurPolicy ResearchMarch 01, 2016

This paper examines the extent of municipal involvement in the funding of teaching hours in the Jewish state primary schools, and the affirmative action policy steps taken within municipalities.

This paper examines the extent of municipal involvement in the funding of teaching hours in the Jewish state primary schools, and the affirmative action policy steps taken within municipalities. Between 2001 and 2009, the municipality’s financial share of teaching hours in the Jewish state primary schools was about 2 weekly hours per class, which is less than 4 percent of total hours and close to one-third of the hours funded by sources other than the Ministry of Education. The Ministry of Education and municipalities fund affirmative action teaching hours for pupils from low socioeconomic backgrounds. This municipal funding has reduced the extent of affirmative action provided by the Ministry of Education by 5 percent from 32 percent to about 27 percent. The reason is that municipalities that are stronger in terms of their socioeconomic characteristics allocated greater resources to primary schools than weaker municipalities did, even though stronger municipalities adopted affirmative action policies in favor of pupils from weaker backgrounds There is a positive correlation between a municipality’s fiscal state and its investment in Jewish state primary education when other variables are held constant: every increase of 1 percent in the average revenue from residents correlates with an increase of 1.2 percent in educational investment (elasticity of 1.2) and the elasticity relative to the level of debt per resident (in absolute terms) is -0.4. Municipal affirmative action is positively correlated with the municipality’s socioeconomic ranking and its fiscal state.